The 2010 UTSA English Graduate Student Symposium "Wild Tongues: Concepts of the Untamed in Scholarship, Teaching, Writing, and Beyond."

Sponsored by the Department of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio

May 1, 2010 at University of Texas San Antonio in San Antonio, TX

Keynote Speaker: Norma Alarcón

Proposal Submission Deadline: March 15, 2010

How do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down? - Gloria Anzaldúa

What does it mean to be wild? Certainly "wild" is often a term associated with the unnatural, the uncultivated, or the abnormal. Throughout history, the wildest ideas have been the first to be subverted and repressed by dominant forces. Must our wild tongues be tamed, or cut out, as Gloria Anzaldúa posits in her essay "How to Tame a Wild Tongue"? Those who initially enact social, political, and educational change are often deemed as wild, unrestrained, undisciplined, and even dangerous. Yet, without transformation there is little growth in both the personal and political spheres. Change makes way for the new and breaks the idea of established practice and challenges our ideas of what is true. Wildness is in many ways the seed of evolution, and revolution, in our systems of belief, practice and creation. Anzaldúa alludes to this change and encourages that acts of incivility both complicate and reinvent our navigations of private, social, and political space.

This symposium seeks to explore concepts of the untamed within the practices of scholarship, teaching, writing, and any area that confronts or interrogates the impact of change and transformation on our lives. This interdisciplinary symposium will bring together graduate students, scholars, writers, and performers from throughout the central and border regions of Texas.

We invite papers that engage the concept of wild tongues in all of their forms. Papers may challenge, complicate, critique, or expand current conceptualizations of the untamed in all disciplines, including, but not limited to, literary, cultural, queer, feminist, environmental, American, political, subaltern, bicultural, and popular cultural studies.

We also encourage topics that propose new and imaginative approaches to discourse analysis, methodology, and pedagogy. Visual arts proposals are highly encouraged; the symposium will feature an exhibition of artistic responses such as paintings, drawings, and sculptures related to our theme. We also invite creative writing proposals that bridge disciplines and explore questions of revolution and imagination.

Please submit 250-word individual abstracts or panel proposals (comprised of a 250-word abstract for the panel as a whole and titles for each paper) to utsagradconf@gmail.com by March 15, 2009. Paste your proposal into the body of the email message and include any technology requests. If submitting a work of art, please attach a low-resolution image of your piece, if possible, in addition to your abstract. The conference registration fee is $20.00 for pre-symposium registration and $25.00 for registration at the symposium.